I think we all know the answer is liberals

I noticed that as well, I love how they keep trying to pretend that Putin just rules by decree. You even see it in articles about the military news as if Putin personally commands all the forces, like he's playing an RTS there or something. It's absolutely incredible framing. I guess it's necessary to keep the whole if we only got rid of Putin everything would be great narrative going.

It's clearly nowhere close to US influence, and it's interesting that people seem to be far less worried about that.

That was the point of Russiagate. The picture of Russia as weak and pitiful failed state was already ingrained since 90's, but since you can hardly fearmonger your population with a weak and pitiful failed state, a new narration was added. So now it is a weak and pitiful failed state with inhuman propganda and corrupting power (sounds kida like... projection? or soon will be). The enemy must be at the same time weak and strong, as per usual fascism.

I remember taking English classes and learning about how to avoid biasing polls and such. But these professional journalists don't even try to have the same level of integrity as school children. Western media is truly incredible. Incredibly shit.

turns out that no amount of propaganda can compete with the material conditions people experience

That's basically the process that US was aiming to prevent from developing with the war. If Europe continued economic integration with Russia and China then US would necessarily start losing political influence over it. Now, Europe is stuck with US unless there's a massive political upheaval, which may yet happen.

To be fair, it's not like EU has any sovereignty at this point. It's a vassal of the US and the bureaucrats do what the empire tells them to.

It's funny isn't it. That's how you know it's an anti-Putin pollster: it's split the vote against Putin in Germany by separating US/NATO/Europe (with or without Ukraine) – 53% or 62% to Putin/Russia's 27%/29%. That's a damning indictment of the pro-war machine. Who knew that if you turn off the gas tap you piss off enough people that they start asking questions like, 'Which scheiß put the price up?'

In France it was multiple choice so people could pick more than one option and it's closer to the combined German results although there are more answers for every category. That makes sense; the real answer is 'all of the above' except 'and the Russians' and, although it's not on there 'and the Ukrainians'. A better question would be who is most responsible, which seems to be how most people have interpreted it.

One question is why change the methodology? Did they think the French would give even more damning answers than the Germans? Or did the pollsters see the German answers and say, 'Quick, how do we make Putin look worse?'

The real nugget of gold from this is that it reveals 62% of Germans and 43% of the French are lemmygrad lurkers: guten tag / bonjour comrades!

it's really getting hard for the propagandists to keep the narrative straight